It's something I'd like to work on again at some point, but TenFourFox is taking up most of my time and Fx has an inherent limit on mips-irix because Rust will never support it (so you'd be looking at no more than 45, maybe 52).

Doesn't bother me. I'm not a fan of the later versions anyway. I ditched Firefox as my primary browser several years ago after the Australis turd landed. Admittedly, something newer than 3.0.19 would be nice on Irix, but I appreciate that it's a massive job porting it...

Alas I stopped using Firefox (on a Fuel) as my main browser after too many sites I use specifically began blocking older browsers (eg. online banking), and of course the flash and js issues were becoming increasingly problematic. Would be nice to use IRIX if I could, but these days it's not practical for the sites I visit most often. I still use Firefox as my default browser, but it's on a 5GHz 2700K.

I'm working on a charitable PC build for the Learn Engineering YouTube channel. Please PM/email/call if you'd like to contribute! Donations of items I can sell to provide funds are also welcome.mapesdhs@yahoo.com+44 (0)131 476 0796+44 (0)7434 635 121

I had a looksey at the Firefox Release Notes for 3.5.x and 3.6.x and it seems to me that having an improved js engine and webfonts would be nice. I'm not sure sure if much of the ogg/theora html 5 stuff will be relevant to our slow machines though. Firefox version 4 and up seem a build too far, regardless of Rust, as they mention SSE2 instructions on the CPU in their system requirements. TenFourFox seems to have its own code for AltiVec on the PowerPC CPU's, but as I understand our MIPS CPUs don't have any of that sort of stuff.

Perhaps Firefox 3.6.x is the relevant maximum to aim for?

Last edited by jimmer on Fri Jul 07, 2017 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.

ClassicHasClass wrote:It's something I'd like to work on again at some point, but TenFourFox is taking up most of my time and Fx has an inherent limit on mips-irix because Rust will never support it (so you'd be looking at no more than 45, maybe 52).

I was looking around, but it's not entirely clear to me what the main problem is. Is that because there's no newer gcc for older OS? Are there any technical limitations on the OS level that can't be overcome by adding coder time?

I've read, for example, that Tiger and Leopard have problems with sandboxing in browsers because browsers would not be able to spawn new processes without running as root. So that's a limitation that would need to be addressed by the OS developer? IRIX would be even a longer shot, I suppose...

Two reasons: no current LLVM (I know there was a porting effort, but not of anything recent), and I don't believe IRIX supports thread-local storage, which Rust requires. (10.4 definitely doesn't, for example, which is why I gave up on Rust on Tiger OS X PowerPC.)

I don't work on this currently. FF 3.5 and 3.6 compiles fine, but need debugging - I never found the problem.

After a long downtime I had some time to replace my nekoware mirror nekoware.de. It's running now on a R5000 Challenge S, which replaced the dead Origin 300. It's not the fastest hardware, but it's serves rsync requests with 25 mbit/s.

Currently I work on a sylpheed 3.5 port. It's running fine, I have also gtkspell with German dictionary running. Actually I work on gnupg, to run with sylpheed. Some packages will show up in beta soon.

ClassicHasClass wrote:Two reasons: no current LLVM (I know there was a porting effort, but not of anything recent), and I don't believe IRIX supports thread-local storage, which Rust requires. (10.4 definitely doesn't, for example, which is why I gave up on Rust on Tiger OS X PowerPC.)

Yeah I knew eventually PPC OS X was going to encounter more and more impediments. So the question is, of course, when do you plan to give up?